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High levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide necessary for the termination of global glaciation

Abstract

The possibility that the Earth suffered episodes of global glaciation as recently as the Neoproterozoic period, between about 900 and 543 million years ago, has been widely discussed1,2,3. Termination of such ‘hard snowball Earth’ climate states has been proposed to proceed from accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere4. Many salient aspects of the snowball scenario depend critically on the threshold of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations needed to trigger deglaciation2,5. Here I present simulations with a general circulation model, using elevated carbon dioxide levels to estimate this deglaciation threshold. The model simulates several phenomena that are expected to be significant in a ‘snowball Earth’ scenario, but which have not been considered in previous studies with less sophisticated models, such as a reduction of vertical temperature gradients in winter, a reduction in summer tropopause height, the effect of snow cover and a reduction in cloud greenhouse effects. In my simulations, the system remains far short of deglaciation even at atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 550 times the present levels (0.2 bar of CO2). I find that at much higher carbon dioxide levels, deglaciation is unlikely unless unknown feedback cycles that are not captured in the model come into effect.

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Figure 1: January zonal-mean air temperature at the lowest model level, for various concentrations of atmospheric CO2.
Figure 2: January zonal-mean clear-sky greenhouse trapping (solid lines) and cloud longwave forcing (CLF) (dashed lines), for various CO2 concentrations.
Figure 3: Typical January vertical temperature profiles for the 100 p.p.m.

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Acknowledgements

We thank P. Hoffman and S. Warren for discussions on a range of matters relating to the Neoproterzoic and to surface albedo in general; J.C.G. Walker for sharing additional thoughts concerning the Mars analogy; and LMD/Paris for providing a congenial environment in which to carry out this work. This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

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Correspondence to Raymond T. Pierrehumbert.

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The author declares that he has no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Figure 1

Comparison of OLR computed with the CCM3 radiation code used in the GCM experiments, and the more accurate Kasting-Ackermancode. (PDF 79 kb)

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Pierrehumbert, R. High levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide necessary for the termination of global glaciation. Nature 429, 646–649 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02640

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